Low pitch is masculine and a grandmother?! Sounds fake, but ok…
How would you describe this sound? Does it evoke any word associations? Is it, perhaps, high? Would you say that it sounds more blunt than sharp or vice versa?
Metaphors are no strangers to our everyday life.
Even without realizing, we use metaphors on a daily basis: time is
money, heart made of gold, someone being an early
bird/night owl…
Hearing is said to be the most abstract sense out of the human
senses, so naturally, listening to music is quite a unique
experience. That is why we tend to borrow words and metaphors that
originate from other senses to talk about music.
If you are still reading this text, it is safe to assume that you are a
proficient speaker of English. Then, you are probably familiar with
high-low metaphor that is widely used in English, among
other European languages such as Russian and Dutch, to
describe sounds of opposite pitch. Interestingly, although this
verticality metaphor seems to be the prevalent one, it is
not universal across all 6,500+ languages that
exist.
For instance, in Balinese (spoken in Bali), pitch is
small or large. In Gbaya
language family, that consists of dozen various languages from the
western Central African Republic, pitches are arranged
genealogically, so high pitch would be called a
daughter and low pitch would be called a
grandmother. Alternative metaphors include
feminine – masculine, rough – smooth,
thin – thick, among others.
All of these diverse metaphorical pitch descriptions might sound
foreign and a bit baffling. But what if I told you
that you would probably apply these metaphors to high- and low-pitched
sounds in the same way as a native speaker? That is, if presented with a
low-pitched sound (imagine something like a heavy bass sound),
you would be more likely to describe it as masculine,
smooth and a grandmother than
feminine, rough and a
daughter.
Even if it sounds far-fetched at this point, I invite you to
click through the dashboard and see how I investigated
whether foreign metaphors are applied correctly by English
speakers!
Sounds and Metaphors : Investigation through a Survey
With this research, I wanted to check whether the
crosslinguistic metaphors are applied to high- and low-pitched sounds in
the same way as they are in the language of origin. To test
that, English-speaking participants were asked to listen to a
high- or low-pitched instrumental music excerpts and
judge whether the metaphor presented on the screen
afterwards is related or unrelated to the sound.
Please feel free to take a demo version of the survey
by scanning the QR code on the left or clicking the link!
Also, in theory, participants are expected to answer the
relatedness question faster when presented with a
matching sound-metaphor pair. To illustrate, when one
reads or hears the word dog, other
words associated with dog, such as
leash, cat, food, come to mind, not
puzzle, case and gum.
Same principle can be applied to music: if you hear a piccolo
(one the highest-pitched instruments) solo and the see word
thin, you should be able to categorize the word as
related to the sound without thinking too much about it.
Conversely, if you see the word thick, it might require
more time to process whether the word is really related or
not.
Results: Accurate, but not Fast. What Does it Mean?
The results show that people are most accurate in rejecting
wrong combinations of language and sound. That means that after
listening to a high-pitched sound, words like
masculine and smooth were deemed to be
irrelevant to the musical excerpt and vice versa.
Unfortunately, the speed with which participants
judged matching and mismatching sound-word combinations did not
differ much.
Strong agreement among participants on what is a right
word and what is a wrong word to describe a
high/low-pitched sound indicates that all of these seemingly
foreign metaphors might actually exist in our
brain, even though we do not use them in English. This finding
also provides evidence for the claim that such metaphorical
associations of pitch might be innate, that is something we are
born with.
The fact that people took approximately the same time to
accept and reject words shows that although we tend to
judge correctly, we are not very efficient in
judging music-word pairs. Even though music can evoke
particular word associations (high-pitched sound → thin), they
might not be as strong as word-word
(girl → feminine) ones.
However, figuring out the precise mechanisms behind how perception of
pitch and thoughts interact is a puzzle to solve for future
researchers.